K Street Cafe

Earlier in the week, AdWeek published a piece I wrote about the impending death of the newspaper. I was responding to an earlier article, in which Ross Dawson predicts the global demise of the newspaper industry in a country-by-country timeline. But while Dawson believes that the news industry will survive in a transformed state, it’s my opinion that the newspaper business model is simply unsustainable. Let me know what you think.

Cross-posted from Ad Week

Newspaper Business Model: Unsustainable in Any Form
The ‘newspapers are dying’ story line is hardly novel

U.S. newspapers as we know them will be extinct by 2017.

So says Ross Dawson, a self-proclaimed “futurist” from Australia who released a global newspaper extinction time line in October. Dawson’s latest time line makes country-by-country predictions based on factors including a nation’s demographics, consumer behaviors and technological capacities. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. newspaper empire is predicted to crumble first, given Americans’ widespread adoption of handheld technology and the declining state of the nation’s newspaper industry. The newspaper will apparently endure a slow and painful death around the globe, spanning from 2017 to 2040—and, perhaps, beyond. (He predicted that Australian newspapers would meet their demise by 2022.)

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I’m Maddie Grant, an association/nonprofit industry blogger on social media and online community building. I’m very happy to have been invited to be a regular poster on K Street Cafe.

This is my first post here, so I’m still getting the lay of the land as to what kinds of topics will interest K Street readers. I am an avid blog reader and definitely consider myself a “content curator”; Here’s the kind of stuff I read and write about on my blog.

So I thought I’d do two things. First, I want point you to a few PR/Public Affairs/Advocacy related blog posts I’ve found very interesting recently – and ask you to tell me if these float your boat or not. Check ‘em out.

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